The Center's Science for Art Fall 2018 Speaker Series welcomes Daniel Stromer on December 14th for his talk “Big Data of the Past: Non-invasive Digitization of Cultural Heritage”
Join us for a lecture and discussion on how Cultural Heritage is one of Europe’s most precious political, economic and social assets. Since libraries, museums, and archives are starting to use massive digitization, a lot of new possibilities arise with this newly generated data. Data extracted from this digital patrimony are the basis for the reconstruction of the historical evolution of most European cities and the economical, cultural, and migration networks between these urban nodes. Through ‘big data of the past’, the project aims to make the past as easily accessible as the present.
Daniel Stromer is a PhD candidate in the Pattern Recognition Lab of the Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, and a visiting student in the Research Laboratory of Electronics (Fujimoto Group) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Talk Details:
Friday, December 14th, 2:30-3:30pm
Tech Institute – Rm L251
2145 Campus Drive
Evanston, IL, 60208
Full Abstract:
Big Data of the Past: Non-invasive Digitization of Cultural Heritage
Daniel Stromer, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg
Cultural Heritage is one of Europe’s most precious political, economic and social assets. Since libraries, museums and archives nowadays start to use massive digitization, a lot of new possibilities arise with this newly generated data. ‘Time Machine’ is a program that brings together research teams from all over Europe and the participation of about 230 institutions. The goal of this consortium is to develop new technologies for the scanning, analyzing, accessing, preserving and communicating of cultural heritage at a massive scale. Data extracted from this digital patrimony are the basis for the reconstruction of the historical evolution of most European cities and the economical, cultural and migration networks between these urban nodes. Through ‘big data of the past’, the project aims to make the past as easily accessible as the present. Another goal is to investigate new methods of digitization for fragile documents. Non-invasive imaging techniques such as X-ray CT are capable of revealing hidden contents of documents that can not be opened anymore. This can help conservators to store information in a digital manner before manually opening or cleaning scrolls or manuscripts.
About Daniel Stromer:
Daniel Stromer studied Medical Engineering and received his MSc in 2015 at the Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg. From 2003 to 2015 he worked for the Angiography and X-ray business unit of Siemens Healthineers where, for example, he set up a predictive maintenance system for monitoring the entire lifecycle of robotic C-arm CT systems. In November 2015, Daniel joined the Pattern Recognition Lab of the FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg as a PhD candidate. His major research subject is the digitization of fragile historical documents by utilizing non-invasive imaging techniques. He tries to find ways to reveal the hidden contents of all kinds of ancient documents without the need of manually opening or cleaning them. Furthermore, he is currently a visiting student in the Research Laboratory of Electronics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Fujimoto Group) working on automatic segmentation of optical coherence tomography data.